In this post I want to share my approach on creating games with indexed pixel art palettes. It’s an experimental approach that is requiring a lot of preparation and there is a lot to improve but maybe it could still be a useful reference to some.

This is a pretty specific topic and will be hard to understand without basic knowledge about shader programming.

I will use the above gif as an example and explain my setup step by step.

For the final part of this guide I will write about the few things I added to the material and my approach to do outlines which take in account the base color.
This part is optional you already have everything you need.
If you are still interested continue reading this part will have more pictures in it. :>

This is the second part of the shading model implementation. In this part we are going to edit a few shader files. Unreal shader files end with a .usf but if you are familiar with hlsl you shouldn’t have any problems. You should also at least understand what deferred rendering means. If you are unfamiliar with that subject take a look at Wikipedia. As this part is mostly about coding there won’t be many pictures. Sorry about that. :<

This was written in February 2016 which means it was written for an old version of the Unreal Engine.
There were a few changes with the newer versions so this is not up to date (mostly changes in which lines the code can be found)
In the comment section of the second part someone mentioned a few useful hints for changes to the 4.14 version so be sure to give that a look if something isn’t working as expected.

For my first three posts I want to write about how to add a custom shading model for the Material-Editor of the Unreal Engine 4. This is something that isn’t very well documented and quite a few people on the forums were struggling with it so I would like to share my results so far.

Welcome to my development blog.
Short introduction: my name is Felix Kate and I’m a game designer from Berlin.
Right now I am still a student at the HTW Berlin but already in my last year.
My focus is set on programming but more into the technical art direction. I have coding experience in C#, Java, hlsl, glsl, cg and a small bit of C++; Graphical skills are lacking but I am able to use quite a few of the major 2D and 3D Tools.

I’m not much of a writer but I will try posting something whenever I have something I want to share.
I hope you have a good time reading. : )